Lee Berger, in full Lee Rogers Berger (born December 22, 1965, Shawnee Mission, Kansas, U.S.) American-born South African paleoanthropologist known for the discovery of the fossil skeletons of Australopithecus sediba, a primitive hominin species that some paleontologists believe is the most-plausible link between the australopithecenes (genus Australopithecus) and humans (genus Homo).

Lee R. Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa holding the cranium of …

Courtesy of Lee Berger and the University of Witwatersrand/AP

Berger was raised in Sylvania and Savannah, Georgia. After he received a B.A. in anthropology from Georgia Southern University in 1989, he studied under noted South African paleoanthropoligist Phillip V. Tobias at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Berger received a Ph.D. in paleoanthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1994 and became a postdoctoral research fellow in the university’s department of anatomy and human biology in 1995. Between 1996 and 1997, Berger served as the director of the university’s paleoanthropology research group in the School of Anatomical Sciences.

He briefly returned to the United States during the late 1990s, accepting adjunct professorships in the anthropology departments of Duke University (1997) and the University of Arkansas (1998). In 1999, however, he became the director of the Palaeoanthropology Unit for Research and Exploration at the Bernard Price Institute of Palaeontology at the University of the Witwatersrand. From 2004 he served as a reader in human evolution and the public understanding of science at the Institute for Human Evolution and the School of Geosciences at the university.

Berger’s early research involved examinations of the morphology of A. africanus. He was part of the team that made the first discovery of A. africanus at the Gladysvale Cave site near Sterkfontein in South Africa. In 1995 he and a colleague published a paper hypothesizing that the “Taung child,” a 2.3-million–2.8-million-year-old fossil of A. africanus previously thought to have been killed by a predatory mammal, may have been killed by a bird of prey. During a vacation with his family in 2006, Berger explored the Ucheliungs Cave in Palau and discovered the bones of a group of small-bodied humans. In his controversial follow-up research, he suggested that many of the skeletal characteristics of the remains were too primitive to occur in genus Homo, whereas other scientists claimed that the remains belonged to a pygmy population of H. sapiens.

In 2008, during a fossil-hunting expedition to the Malapa Caves in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site near Johannesburg, Berger’s nine-year-old son, Matthew, discovered a fossilized jawbone and collarbone belonging to a juvenile male hominin; Berger noted the mix of primitive and modern characteristics in one of the specimen’s canine teeth. Shortly thereafter, Berger discovered the partial skeleton of an adult female that possessed similar features. The partial skeleton, labeled MH2, has become recognized as the most complete early hominin skeleton known. The well-preserved bones found at the site included a pelvis, a foot, a complete right hand, and two skulls.

A closer examination of the remains revealed that they possessed a combination of apelike and humanlike features; the specimens also displayed more features in common with the earliest members of Homo than any other australopithecine species. Berger and colleagues named this new species A. sediba after the word in the Sesotho language meaning “fountain” or “wellspring.” Uranium dating determined that the remains were between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old. When this technique was combined with paleomagnetic dating (the calculation of a rock’s age by comparing the magnetic orientation of the iron within it to that in surrounding rocks), the specimens were determined to be approximately 1,977,000 years old. The results raised the possibility that A. sediba may have been an ancestor to H. erectus. Furthermore, the age of the specimens and the collection of features they shared with Homo may either allow A. sediba to become a possible transitional species that links Australopithecus with Homo or confirm it as a contemporary of the true transitional form.

In 2013 and 2014 Berger and colleagues excavated skeletal remains from a deep recess in the Rising Star cave system near the Swartkrans World Heritage Site in South Africa. The remains totalled more than 1,500 fossil specimens belonging to a new species that he and his team named H. naledi. As first described in a 2015 paper, H. naledi was shown to share morphological traits in common with members of Australopithecus and Homo.

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...and that shares several morphological characteristics in common with the hominin genus Homo. The first specimens were found and identified by American-born South African paleoanthropologist Lee Berger in 2008 at Malapa Cave system in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site in northeastern South Africa. This discovery was viewed by scientists as a potential turning point in...

remnant, impression, or trace of an animal or plant of a past geologic age that has been preserved in Earth’s crust. The complex of data recorded in fossils worldwide—known as the fossil record —is the primary source of information about the history of life on Earth.

Any member of the zoological “tribe” Hominini (family Hominidae, order Primates), of which only one species exists today— Homo sapiens, or human beings. The term is used most often to refer to extinct members of the human lineage, some of which are now quite well known from...